The “California Naturalists”: Memory as
Spiritual Renewal and Other Parallels in
London, Norris, and Steinbeck
Jesse S. Crisler
Brigham Young University
I
dentifying works and authors, especially those producing material
during roughly comparable historical periods, through isolated similarities has become a commonplace pastime for critics. Thus, standard anthologies loosely group writers as different in tone as Charles
W. Chesnutt and Bret Harte, as opposite in aesthetics
as Sarah Orne Jewett and George Washington Cable, and as conflicting in purpose as Kate Chopin and Joel Chandler Harris under the
barely serviceable rubric of “local colorists.” Similarly, discovering the
debts writers owe to their authorial progenitors, especially when obscurity enshrouds or unlikelihood swathes such debts, has catapulted
many fledgling scholars to lasting fame, if not tangible fortune, as astute and perceptive savants whose well-read erudition enabled them to
boldly go where no critic had gone before. Indeed, the more remote
the putative influences, the happier both discoverers and their peers
seemingly are; whether the later writer demonstrably read the earlier
hardly matters when abstruse questions of literary authority are at
stake. In some instances, however, either empirical parallels between
certain authors or clear “line[s] of descent” between writers of chronologically successive periods do legitimately exist (Lutwack 47). Linkages
L&B 21:1&2 2001
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Literature and Belief
of both varieties, for example, connect Frank Norris, Jack London,
and John Steinbeck, an authorial triumvirate Richard Cracroft has labeled the “California Naturalists.” Still, although examining the lives
and canons of these three writers has categorized more or less evident
affinities among them (including parallels in biographical detail, similarities in literary taste, interest, and influence, correspondences in
philosophical outlook and method, admiration of belletristic achievements, resemblances in and/or plagiarism of narrative events or ideas,
and accidents of either history or fiction), perhaps the most significant connection among them centers generally on their expression of
sometimes wintry world views in terms which have come to be defined as Literary Naturalism and, perhaps paradoxically given the nature of those views, on their common use of memory as a means by
which characters experience spiritual renewal.
As he so often did in his long and distinguished career as knowledgeable biographer and trenchant critic of “literary California,”
Franklin Walker provided the ostensible last word on the biographical
connection between Frank Norris and Jack London a quarter-century
ago. In the first place, Walker noted that both entered the University
of California as “special students” (22), since neither had fulfilled all
necessary entrance requirements for admission because of inadequate
high school preparation—Norris at San Francisco Boys High School
and earlier at Belmont Academy, where a broken arm suffered in an
intramural football game abruptly abbreviated his tenure (and where
London later worked in the Academy’s laundry, a miserable and backbreaking episode chronicled in Martin Eden [1909]), and London at
Oakland High School, in which he enrolled at the unlikely age of
nineteen. After study at both Berkeley and Harvard, Norris secured a
position as assistant editor of the San Francisco Wave, a slick-paper
weekly published, according to its masthead, for “those in the swim”;
besides these heavy editorial duties he also contributed a variety of reportorial pieces, interviews, short stories, and translations to each
issue. Not long after Norris quit The Wave for pastures in the East he
deemed
greener
for
aspiring writers, London submitted a story to the same periodical
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 5
(Walker 16). Finally, despite relatively ignominious academic records at
Berkeley, both writers cordially responded to invitations to return to
their alma mater as successful writers: Norris read a then unpublished
short story, “Two Hearts That Beat as One,” on September 12, 1901
(“College” [1]), just weeks before his untimely death on October 25,
while London, after chiding the English Department for requiring lifeless reading assignments of its hapless enrollees, learned to his chagrin
that a lengthy extract from his own The Call of the Wild (1903) constituted one such assignment (Walker 23).
Of course, Walker did not collect all the biographical connections
between Norris and London, for their lives are strangely alike in several other ways. First, both became members of San Francisco’s elite
Bohemian Club, participating in its dramatic extravaganzas. Second,
when Norris left San Francisco in early 1898, he did so to accept employment with maverick publisher S. S. McClure as both correspondent for McClure’s Magazine and manuscript reader for the rising
publishing firm of Doubleday and McClure. In time, McClure’s ran
pieces by Norris and subsequently, over a ten-year period, by London.
After the success of McTeague in 1899, McClure supported Norris financially while he researched The Octopus (1901), just as, later, impressed with the success of The Son of the Wolf (1900), McClure
supplied a retainer of $125 per month to London to write A Daughter
of the Snows (1902), his first novel (Sinclair 65). Not-withstanding McClure’s faith in his protégés, he refused to publish any of five articles
Norris composed while covering the Spanish-American war under his
employ, and he ultimately sold the rights to London’s initial novel to
Lippincott’s, which eventually published it (Sinclair 90). Finally, Norris and London shared another disappointment. In July 1902, hoping
to sail around the world to gather raw material for a projected novel
to be titled The Wolf, Norris and his wife, Jeannette, first shortened
their anticipated voyage to a trip to India and then cancelled it altogether because of Jeannette’s sudden illness. Five years later, London
and his second wife, Charmian, also truncated a planned circumnavigation of the world, opting instead for a cruise to Hawaii and the
South Seas in London’s own ketch, the Snark.
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Literature and Belief
While no critic has produced an investigation similar to Walker’s of
biographical affinities between either of these turn-of-the-century writers and their successor Steinbeck, many nonetheless obtain. Though
few of these are biographical, those which are seem telling in retrospect. For instance, Norris travelled to Harvard in the late summer of
1894 specifically to enroll in a course in creative writing taught by
famed professor Lewis E. Gates; similarly, Steinbeck took a series of
courses at Stanford geared to teach him how to write fiction, one of
which was taught by Edith Mirrielees, a well-known short story writer
who in time became associated with the famous Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference in Vermont (Parini 34–35). At Harvard, Norris followed a
rigorous regimen of writing which included short themes submitted
thrice per week, a longer effort every two weeks, and a still longer
piece every six weeks, developing solid writing practices which held
him in good stead as a habitually consistent writer until he died. Likewise, Steinbeck at Stanford adopted the habit of daily writing, a discipline he maintained throughout his life, even when in other aspects
he leaned toward excess (Parini 36). In one significant particular
Steinbeck’s life also mirrored London’s. Unlike Norris, who until his
parents’ divorce was the scion of a jewelry business, London and
Steinbeck had to fend for themselves. London largely supported himself in a startling variety of odd jobs in Oakland and elsewhere, just as
Steinbeck during his college years also worked at whatever he could in
Oakland and the Salinas Valley (Lisca 25)—as a sugar company maintenance man, a department store clerk, a surveyor, a ditch digger, and,
predictably, a bindlestiff, from all of which, like London before him,
he gleaned material he would later transform into enviable fiction.
Just as some details of Norris’s and London’s lives are similar, so
were some of their literary tastes and interests. For example, that both
admired Kipling’s particular brand of adventure story comes as no surprise (Walker 22). Norris expressed that admiration through Condy
Rivers, protagonist in Blix, published in 1900, who “tasted the intense
delight of revealing to another an appreciation of a literature hitherto
ignored” by reading Kipling aloud to his female “pal” Travis Bessemer
(74–75); that same year, on October 27, London
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 7
reported to a friend that he too had fallen under Kipling’s sway:
“There is no end of Kipling in my work. . . . I have even quoted him.
I would never possibly have written anywhere near the way I did had
Kipling never been. True, true, every bit of it” (Labor, Leitz, and
Shepard 216). Both writers had also read Zola, particularly Germinal
(1885), which Norris imitated in The Octopus and London in The Iron
Heel (1908) (Walker 21). Norris and London read as well the disparate pair of Bierce, whom London knew and Norris parodied in
The Wave (“Perverted”), and Browning, whose poems Norris’s mother
read aloud in meetings of the San Francisco Browning Society. London felt that Browning’s poetry along with Swinburne’s added a certain elegance to one’s personal bookcase (Sinclair 30), and both
instantly appeal to young Martin Eden. Steinbeck also shared a literary predilection with Norris. Jay Parini quotes a friend of the novelist
who states Steinbeck had read the “great French and English” writers
apparently eagerly (39), as had Norris, judging from copies of works
by Flaubert, Zola, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Eliot, and other European writers in his personal library.
But Perhaps the clearest indication of congruent literary taste between Norris and London comes in the form of a memorandum London wrote to himself about Norris. Now a part of miscellaneous papers
in the Huntington Library’s staggering Jack London collection, the
note reminded London to “See Norris in CRITIC of May 1902,” a reference to a series of seven articles by Norris collectively entitled “Salt
and Sincerity,” which ran in monthly installments of the Critic between April and October 1902. In the installment in question, Norris
championed a version of reader-response criticism long before it had
earned that appellation: “Who cares which of the Waverleys Sir Walter
thought his best? . . . The author’s point of view is very different from
yours—the reader’s. Which one do you think the best? That’s the point”
(196). Further, he maintained rather idealistically that in the court of
blind critical judgment, bathed by a necessary “lapse of considerable
time,” the informed public, even if one-eyed, remained king and “will
always decide justly” regarding the fate of literature (197). If, as his
memorandum suggests, London presumably agreed with Norris’s senti-
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Literature and Belief
ments, then that could in part explain London’s seemingly uncanny
lifelong ability to produce what his public desired to read. London’s
memorandum also looks forward to another connection between himself and Norris involving the Critic. In its September number the Critic
carried the sixth of Norris’s series as well as “Again the Literary Aspirant” by London. These essays, as novelist Henry Blake Fuller, their
contemporary, remarked in a discussion in the Chicago Evening Post,
while similar in content, differ markedly in purpose. Norris trumpets
his faith in the critical acumen of the “Plain People,” prophesying that
if “the modern novelist does not . . . address himself directly to them
intelligently and simply, he will fail” (222), a note he first sounded a
few months earlier in the piece prompting London’s memorandum.
In the intervening months, however, London seems to have modified
his presumed approval of Norris’s position, for in his essay he supports the idea that only well-trained critics, those Fuller described as
being “sufficiently informed regarding the broad trend of culture and
events to have some adequate realization of the limited value of the
mere passing moment in its relation to the general course of time” (9),
can fairly judge literary quality.
Quite naturally, the observable resemblance in literary valuation
among Norris, London, and Steinbeck suggests an equally obvious correspondence in their philosophical credos as naturalistic writers, for,
while the debate over the particular brand of Naturalism each exhibits
rages, few would argue that none of the three was indeed not a Naturalist. Thus, though Norris, in emulating his mentor Zola, and London, in
infusing large doses of Marx and Spencer into his works, each wrote
novels reflecting their respective purposes, the work of both today
seems more firmly rooted in American Naturalism than in anything
else. An early seed of influence on both at Berkeley later characteristically matured in their fiction. As Donald Pizer and others have shown,
Norris, having encountered the ideas of eminent scientist Joseph Le
Conte in a course he took from him at the University of California, unhesitatingly incorporated at least some of Le Conte’s philosophy in his
early stories and novels. Whether London, like Norris, also read Le
Conte during his year at the university is not as clear; that he did know
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 9
about Le Conte’s teaching, however, is evident, since in Martin Eden,
Professor Caldwell in a self-pejorative confession extols Le Conte’s
plea for greater breadth of learning among those who consider themselves educated: “I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the interpretative branches of sciences. . . . I wonder if you’ll believe that I’ve
never been inside a physics or chemistry laboratory? . . . Le Conte was
right” (241).
Those intimately familiar with the texts of Norris and London know
that they also shared a belief in other philosophical tenets. While any
of several of these could be examined, one perhaps more interesting
than most is their odd conviction of the inevitable triumph of the
Anglo-Saxon “race.” Not only politically incorrect by today’s standards
but biologically untenable as well, this idea imbues the work of both
writers. For example, in his essay “The Frontier Gone at Last” Norris
applauds the wholesale slaughter of Caribbean natives, blithely ignoring the fact that their successful annihilators hailed from southern
rather than northern Europe. London supports the idea of AngloSaxon conquest even more baldly in The Valley of the Moon (1913), in
which protagonist Saxon Brown, as “a flower of Anglo-Saxon stock,”
can surmount any hurdle life throws in her path because she is a true
“thoroughbred” (129).
Philosophical parallels are likewise abundant between Norris and
Steinbeck. Joseph Fontenrose compared Steinbeck’s well-known response to land and earth to an “awareness of and sympathy with the
non-human, with the physical and biological environment in all its
power and magnitude, dwarfing and absorbing humanity,” a quality
he found “visible” in Norris’s work (3). Leonard Lutwack in a discussion of Norris’s essay, “A Neglected Epic,” suggested The Grapes of a
Wrath (1930) as a lineal descendant of The Octopus (47), a kinship Warren French also surveyed (18), while William Rose Benét in a review of
In Dubious Battle (1936) averred that its “vigorous realism” recalled The
Octopus (10). Finally, Robert DeMott, mourning in his discussion of
Steinbeck’s reading that “little has been written” concerning the nature of the “relationship” between Norris and Steinbeck, argued that
Steinbeck “shared certain thematic and aesthetic affinities with Nor-
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Literature and Belief
ris,”
notably
in
The
Grapes
of
Wrath
(165).
Lamentably, scholars have not as sedulously tallied like philosophical bents between London and Steinbeck. Prominent exceptions are R.
S. Hughes, who contended that Steinbeck aspired to be another Jack
London, that is, a successful purveyor of thought-provoking adventure
tales (9), and Parini, who asserted that Steinbeck, while in college,
dreamed of languid excursions to exotic parts of the globe modeled on
those of London (29).
A look at which of each others’ books these writers personally admired usefully bridges analysis of their philosophies and scrutiny of the
other writers they either praised or echoed in their own work. Having
died the youngest and earliest of the three, Norris failed to document
whether he had read any of London’s stories; he could not have read
any of London’s novels, since the first did not appear until late in
1902, after his death. London, on the other hand, recorded his appreciation of at least four of Norris’s novels. Commenting on April 30,
1899, on Norris’s recent employment with the McClure syndicate,
London asked of fellow California writer Cloudesley Johns, “Have you
read his Moran of the Lady Letty? It’s well done” (Labor, Leitz, and Shepard 72), succinct praise which he underscored two months later in a
subsequent letter, dated July 5, 1899, in which he predicted Johns
would “enjoy Rose-Seley’s criticism of Frank Norris, and Frank Norris’s
rejoinder” (Labor, Leitz, and Shepard 93). London evidently appreciated Norris’s spirited retaliation against Rose-Seley’s ridicule of his
maritime blunders, written not so much to defend obvious errors he
had made in Moran (1898) as to castigate Rose-Seley for his failure to
recognize literary artistry in action (Leitz 120). Two years later, not yet
having attained the success he himself would soon achieve, London
praised Norris more overtly, specifically, and extensively in a review of
The Octopus, a copy of which he owned (Hamilton 16); commending
Norris for an impressive first volume in his “Epic of the Wheat,” London ended the review by noting that Norris’s novel consummated “the
promise of Moran and McTeague” (“Octopus” 47). Later, in 1914, when
thoughts of Norris and his work had all but disappeared from America’s collective reading mind and his younger brother Charles G. Nor-
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 11
ris issued what most critics today assume to be Norris’s first written
book, Vandover and the Brute, London both echoed his earlier judgment
of Frank Norris and paid even more vigorous tribute to him in a
telegram dispatched to Charles on April 15: “Vandover and the Brute
is Frank Norris from A to Z. In it is all his ripe promise which he so
splendidly fulfilled[.] Vandover and the Brute was twenty years ahead of
its time and today it is just in its time. All lovers of Norris will hail it
with deepest satisfaction” (Labor, Leitz, and Shepard 1329).
Like London, Steinbeck also respected Norris as an accomplished
predecessor, if copies of McTeague and The Octopus in his own library
serve as indicators of his regard (DeMott 84). While his library additionally contained copies of two London books, The Call of the Wild
and The Sea-Wolf (1904), Steinbeck’s reference to these works in one of
his own novels more clearly reveals his favorable estimate of them (DeMott 69). In The Pastures of Heaven (1932) Miss Molly Morgan, the valley’s new teacher, institutes several educational innovations with her
young charges, among which is a daily half hour of oral reading of
“boys books,” including works by Scott, Zane Grey, and James Oliver
Curwood, as well as London’s two most popular novels, all of which
her students judged “not baby stories . . . but exciting, grown-up stories” (42).
A short step from admiring another’s work is imitating it. James R.
Giles directed attention to a resemblance between Ross Wilbur, hero
of Norris’s Moran, and Vance Corliss, protagonist in London’s A
Daughter of the Snows (22), both of whom undergo transformations
from effete society blades, whose primary concerns gravitate toward
debutante balls and polo matches, to aggressively masculine heroes, as
evidenced by Wilbur’s exultation when he knifes a Chinese pirate and
would-be thief and by Corliss’s jubilance when he realizes he has successfully decked a barroom bully with only his fist for a weapon. (In
like vein Frona Welse, London’s representative of the fin-de-siècle
“new woman” in Snows, mirrors her counterpart, Moran Sternerson,
Norris’s female Viking throwback in Moran [Giles 22].) Walker
pointed out a similarity between Wilbur and another London hero,
Humphrey Van Weyden of The Sea-Wolf, concluding that their mar-
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Literature and Belief
itime experiences (beginning with their being shanghaied near or in
San Francisco Bay and culminating in their metamorphoses into lean,
but sensitive fighting machines) roughly correspond (16). Less comprehensive than London’s imitations of Moran is the reform Martin Eden
undergoes when he, like McTeague before him, bows to the forceful
whim of a beautiful woman, losing first his taste for steam beer (Watson 139) and then relinquishing altogether his addiction to tobacco in
his bid for Ruth Morse’s affections, both recalling Trina Sieppe’s modification of McTeague’s desire for cheap tobacco and steam beer.
Echoes of McTeague run as well through The Valley of the Moon, in
which Billy Roberts serenades Saxon on their train ride home from a
day spent together at a bricklayers’ picnic in Weasel Park with “a
lugubrious song of many stanzas” (41), reminiscent of the “six lugubrious airs” McTeague sang each Sunday afternoon accompanying himself
on his concertina (3). Even more compelling as evidence of London’s
imitation of Norris is Billy’s marriage proposal to Saxon. What he
lacks in romantic phrasing Billy offsets with impassioned fervor when
he
cries,
“Say,
Saxon
. . . It’s no use my holdin’ it any longer. . . . What’s the matter with you
an’ me gettin’ married” (96), an offer recalling that of McTeague, who
in an access of emotion as courtly as Billy’s articulates his own proposal to Trina as she confusedly awakens from the effects of ether in
his dental chair: “Listen here, Miss Trina, I like you better than any
one else; what’s the matter with us getting married” (24). Faced with
such gallant offers, how could either heroine refuse?
Nor are examples of Steinbeck’s imitation of both Norris and London difficult to find. Elaine Ware described a number of parallels between McTeague and Steinbeck’s “Flight,” a short story Hughes also
compared to London’s “To Build a Fire” (9). But evidence that Steinbeck patterned one of his major works at least in part after McTeague
is even more pointed. A thorough analysis of language, diction, and
plot in comparable scenes in Norris’s novel and Steinbeck’s Of Mice
and Men (1937) led Richard Allan Davison to the conclusion that
Steinbeck closely modeled the fight between the slow-witted Lennie
Small and the boss’s bantam-weight son Curley on a quarrel Marcus
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 13
Schouler, once McTeague’s best friend, provokes with McTeague that
ripens into a wrestling match (21–23). Marcus, resentful over being
bested by McTeague in the match, anticipates Mike Tyson’s offended
rage by biting through his opponent’s earlobe, to which the normally
goodnatured but powerful McTeague responds by gripping Marcus’s
arm forcefully enough to break it. Steinbeck replays the scene, assigning the role of aggrieved bully to Curley, who, suspecting that Lennie
laughs at him for failing to corral his sultry wife, smashes his nose,
thereby causing Lennie, urged by his pal George Milton, to crush Curley’s hammering fist in his huge hand. A second instance of Steinbeck’s
imitation of McTeague in Of Mice and Men occurs during the prestrangulation dialogue between Lennie and Curley’s wife when, fearful that
George will find out he has petted his puppy to death (as he had formerly killed a series of small animals) and prevent him from tending rabbits on their mythical ranch, Lennie listens absently to her tale of an
imagined acting triumph which ended somewhat incongruously in her
abrupt marriage. Their conversation vividly reminds one of Norris’s
similar study in abnormal psychology, the premurder dialogue between Zerkow, the red-haired Jew with grasping prehensile fingers in
McTeague, and his wife Maria, the Mexican maid-of-all-work, whom
Zerkow, still fanatically fascinated by Maria’s previous mental meanderings of a lost ancestral fortune of gold dinnerware, refuses to credit
not only that she no longer remembers her oft-repeated litany of the
gold service but that she also disavows having ever recited it. Instead,
Maria accuses Zerkow himself of madness, just as Curley’s wife accuses Lennie.
A penultimate aspect in which these writers resemble each other
rests on two charges of plagiarism levied against them. By far the more
complicated, the situation involving Norris and London, has been explained in some detail by Walker and others. S. T. Clover, editor of
the Los Angeles Express, originally discovered the previously unnoticed
similarity between Norris’s story, “The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock,”
published in Century’s July 1902 number, and London’s “Moon-Face,”
appearing in the Argonaut on July 21 that same year. Both hinge on a
relatively unusual plot device, the retrieval by a pet dog of a stick of
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Literature and Belief
dynamite which the dog’s master had cast into a body of water, hoping to kill as many fish as possible but instead killing himself. Since
London’s story was printed after Norris’s, his having plagiarized the
idea from Norris seemed probable (Walker 17). Though Clover probably desired to exonerate London, he managed, instead, to muddy already cloudy waters still further by mentioning yet a third story which
turned on the same incident: the November 1901 issue of The Black
Cat, a periodical specializing in adventure fiction, carried “An Exploded Theory” by Charles Forrest McLean, in which a dog retrieves a
lighted cartridge from a pool of water east of Seattle where his master
had thrown it after a disgruntling day of fishing without measurable
result (Walker 18). While the master eludes death in this version, the
parallel to it of both Norris’s and London’s efforts was damning. Fortunately, when William S. Caldwell subsequently proclaimed that he
had written a fourth story depending on the identical device for the
California News, also in November 1901, far from creating even more
eddies in a by now vertiginously spinning whirlpool, Caldwell at last
supplied a believable explanation for presumed plagiarism by both
Norris and London by relating that his own source had been a newspaper article which he had clipped to recast as a fictional sketch
(Walker 18). A few years later, when McClure asked London to respond to still another accusation of plagiarism, London denied the
charge in a letter dated April 10, 1906, reminding McClure with some
mirth of this earlier, more complex incident and advising him that he,
like many other writers, routinely massaged articles they read in newspapers into the fiction they published: “Norris and I had read the
same newspaper account, and proceeded to exploit it” (Labor, Leitz,
and Shepard 569).
Not as involved as the Norris-London episode, the charge by Steinbeck’s contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald of plagiarism of material in
McTeague for Of Mice and Men is no less interesting. Edmund Wilson
first disclosed Steinbeck’s minor borrowings from Norris in 1940, including transferring both the method and type of Zerkow’s maniacal
badgering of Maria for continual retellings of her ancestors’ fabled gold
dishes into the scene in which Lennie obsessively pesters George with
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 15
ceaseless requests for an oral description of their common dream of
owning a small farm (840). Ironically, Wilson himself pilfered his “evidence” of Steinbeck’s theft from Fitzgerald, who in a letter to Wilson,
dated November 25, 1940, which accompanied Fitzgerald’s own
marked copy of McTeague, termed Steinbeck a “cagey cribber” (Bruccoli
and Duggan 612). Using that copy, Davison comprehensively explored
the precise nature of Steinbeck’s reworking of Norris’s material, charitably determining that he simply “play[ed] variations on a source” rather
than actually stealing from it (223), and even more tolerantly relegating
Wilson’s own plundering of Fitzgerald to a mere note, simply remarking that in Wilson’s discussion of Steinbeck’s “borrowing” from Norris,
“Fitzgerald’s name is not mentioned” (225). But what Wilson planted
others have patiently watered. Most recently within the broader context
of literary influence, John H. Timmerman in a balanced appraisal reviewed the issue of whether Steinbeck filched anything—plot, event, or
even idea—from Norris, deciding that, while “several passages from
M
c
T
e
a
g
u
e
. . . may support Fitzgerald’s charge” (271), Zerkow’s compulsive wish to
hear Maria’s story incessantly repeated entirely lacks “any of the tenderness George shows toward Lennie” (272).
Historical accidents form an arena for a final series of links among
these three novelists. Norris, for example, wrote an early poem
entitled “Crepusculum,” later collected by Ella Sterling Cummins
Mighels in The Story of the Files (1893) and accompanied by a brief comment on Norris as poet (359–60); coincidentally, in London’s The Valley
of the Moon Saxon experiences great excitement when she learns that ten
fugitive poems by her mother, Daisy Wiley Brown, an early emigrant to
California, had appeared in the same Mighels volume (345). Later in
the novel, Mark Hall, loosely based on George Sterling, pronounces
Saxon’s mother “a true poet” (398). Elsewhere in The Valley of the Moon
Billy recalls that his father told him he shot grizzlies in the mountains
“up north of Sacramento” (319), an adventure Norris, who not long before he died wrote to his publisher that he could “shoot bears from the
windows” of a mountain cabin recently acquired, would doubtless have
relished (Crisler 203). (Incidentally, Steinbeck was born in Salinas in
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Literature and Belief
1902, just eight months before Norris penned this letter not far away in
San Francisco.)
Unlike the connections explored thus far, there are others in which
all three novelists play simultaneously. For example, all three failed to
graduate from college. All served as war correspondents, Norris in the
Spanish-American War, London in the Russo-Japanese War, and
Steinbeck in World War II, each writing dispatches or articles about
what they saw. All frequently took stories from people they met in
their own lives: Norris gathered material for his fiction from a variety
of unusual sources, such as the retired sea captain in San Francisco
whose story he records in Blix; London paid a young Sinclair Lewis
for nearly thirty plots in 1910 and 1911, eventually using at least five
of them (Hendricks and Shepard 483); and Steinbeck gave a bum who
related his story to him on the road two dollars for the right to mold
it into fiction (Parini 32). All also placed themselves in their novels:
Norris appears near the end of McTeague as “a tall, lean young man
with a thick head of hair surprisingly gray,” a fair description of his
own physical exterior at the time he was completing the novel (280);
in The Valley of the Moon London inserts himself and Charmian as
Jack and Clara Hastings who sail a skiff named, like his own real boat,
the Roamer, take Saxon and Billy aboard for a few hours, and appreciatively acknowledge Saxon’s recognition of Jack as a “war correspondent in the Japanese-Russian War” (428); and Steinbeck figures in
East of Eden (1952) as a grandson of a major character, Samuel Hamilton. All three writers had interest in and acquaintance with things
nautical they later incorporated in their works: Moran, Blix, and A
Man’s Woman (1900); The Sea-Wolf, Martin Eden, and The Cruise of the
Snark (1911); and Cup of Gold (1932), Sea of Cortez (1941), and Cannery
Row (1945). All began their careers as students: four poems, eight stories and sketches, a play, and an article by Norris appearing in various
Berkeley student publications; ten articles and stories by London published in The High School Aegis, a literary magazine at Oakland High
School; and two stories and three satirical poems by Steinbeck appearing in two Stanford student periodicals. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all considered themselves Californian by birth, education,
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 17
and, had they thought of it, the grace of God. Of course, Norris had
not actually been born in California but in Chicago, but he did little
to dispel the popular notion of his California nativity, once even gratuitously manipulating the facts of his background to suggest a more
concrete connection to California than he could really claim,
brazenly stating that he “was ‘bawn ‘n raise’ in California” (Crisler
57), a biographical example of joining those one seems unable to
beat.
So closes this extensive consideration of an intricate inter-authorial
association. Yet in the words of Henry James in The Beast in the Jungle
(1903), are not some of these correspondences so many “trivialities of
youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible
germs, but too deeply buried” to be of real importance (66), that is, are
not many of these examples, numerous though they must seem, characterized more by their superficial nature than by their essential worth?
The answer to this rightly posed question is not a simple one, for, while
many of these affiliations among Norris, London, and Steinbeck might
qualify as insignificant, shallow, weak, even nugatory, others decidedly
do not, and all at least possess intrinsic appeal for students of these writers who perforce must be interested in any information supplied or conclusions drawn about them. Taken as a whole, then, these parallels
coalesce into an appropriate canvas of such specific narrative and thematic consequence that examples of its employment by all three writers
pervade their best-known works.
As Literary Naturalists, all three conceived fictive worlds that were
quite bleak, describing dismal conditions surrounding characters who
struggle in vain against them. A case in point is Mr. Sieppe, Trina’s
blustering father in McTeague, a voluble but largely ineffective martinet.
A man who perceives life as a perpetual series of military contests,
Sieppe approaches even the most mundane tasks with an insecurity obstreperously masked by a steady stream of commands issued to his family. Norris’s introduction of him typifies his behavior: “Mr. Sieppe
toiled and perspired. Upon him devolved the responsibility of the excursion. He seemed to consider it a matter of vast importance, a veritable expedition” (48). During a family outing Sieppe’s inadvertent
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Literature and Belief
destruction of his son’s birthday present, a toy steamboat, foreshadows
his later inability to make an adequate living in Oakland and his subsequent failure to turn his “third interest in an upholstering business in
the suburbs of Los Angeles” into a success (112). When mounting debt
forces Sieppe to mortgage his house, he characteristically determines to
emigrate to New Zealand in the hope of better prospects. Sieppe’s problem, Norris implies, is not the unfairness of malevolent Nature but his
own inability to conduct his life well by using to advantage what talents
or gifts he has. Thus, if living is the contest he imagines it to be, his defeat by his environment is self-inflicted because he has refused to learn
how to participate profitably in the game.
London likewise peoples his novels with characters beleaguered by
forces they refuse to combat efficiently. Such a character is Ruth Morse,
whom Martin Eden misguidedly considers his ideal love, and for whom
he sacrifices a great deal. Ruth, though not an aristocrat, enjoys the
privileges of education and taste which her father’s wealth and her
mother’s position in society have conferred on her. When her brother
Arthur introduces the virile but uncouth and unschooled Martin into
her world, she finds herself powerfully attracted both to his robust
masculinity and his lusty strength. Inevitably, the two sides of Ruth’s
nature clash: on the one hand, she approves of the progress Martin
makes under her tutelage toward becoming civilized; on the other, she
finds resisting his animal appeal difficult. In the world of romanticized fiction, Ruth would have tamed this barbarian, after which both
would then have lived happily. But in London’s naturalistic world,
Ruth receives a more realistic treatment. When an unfair story in an
Oakland newspaper paints Martin as a shiftless socialist, Ruth succumbs to parental demands as well as to the comfort of her known
world rather than challenge information which her parents instantly
believe but which she knows to be patently incorrect. She breaks her
engagement to Martin, symbolically rejecting the opportunity he represented for a fuller life than the spoiled existence she had accepted as
her right. Like Sieppe, Ruth performs inadequately, primarily because
she is neither secure nor passionate enough to achieve goals she imagines she desires. To have married Martin, either as she first found him
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 19
or as he later becomes, would have meant a wholesale restructuring of
Ruth’s ideals, a tall order which she fails to fill.
Steinbeck also draws characters against a naturalistic background.
In The Grapes of Wrath, Al Joad idolizes his older brother Tom, newly
released from a stint in the state penitentiary. At sixteen, Al seems capable, resourceful, and eager to help his family secure employment in
golden California. Nursing their rattletrap truck across various environmentally unaccommodating western states like a nervous hen
coaxing reluctant chicks across a busy street, Al exults with the others
when at last they arrive in storied Central Valley and can begin looking for the “work” that has talismanically lured them during their
journey. However, though Al is as willing to work as the rest, unlike
them, he possesses a fatal flaw: he is selfish. Normally, this flaw manifests itself harmlessly either in irrepressible sexual desire or in a need
for his prowess as a skilled mechanic to be lauded. But Al’s true nature asserts itself when the proverbial chips are down and the Joads
hit rockbottom, their meager funds depleted, Rose of Sharon’s baby
dead and she too weak to walk, their truck mired in mud, Tom wanted
by the law, and Pa unable to make even rudimentary decisions. When
Ma instinctively turns to Al as the one dependable male remaining to
help her herd her dwindling family to the safety of higher ground, Al
disappointingly elects to remain with the Wainwrights, his fiancée’s
family, who possess neither Ma’s vision nor her determination. And so
like the other undependable men in the novel, Al also flunks life’s
test, abandoning his mother when she most needs him.
However, such characters comprise only one side of the naturalistic
fiction of Norris, London, and Steinbeck; within this bitter context
these Naturalists also delineate characters who, instead of succumbing
to life’s apparent despair, embrace living fully, trusting the common
thread of memory, whether their own, another character’s, or even
their fictional creator’s, to lead them not to the spiritual desolation to
which the Mr. Sieppes, the Ruth Morses, and the Al Joads so easily assent, but to the spiritual restoration paradoxically available even in a
naturalistic world. A consideration of representative characters who
through the lens of memory discover spiritual renewal elucidates by
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far the most salient correspondence among these writers.As master
storytellers, Norris, London, and Steinbeck learned early how to transfer their own authorial memories effectively to their fiction. Thus,
Norris’s visit to the Big Dipper Mine in the High Sierras to complete
McTeague yielded fruit as one of several settings in that novel, just as
his familiarity with an “accommodation street” (2), located a mere
block below Van Ness Avenue (which one side of his family’s house in
San Francisco overlooked), later translated into faultless description
in the same work. Similarly, the details of the Cliff House, B Street
station in Oak-land, the Orpheum, and Scheutzen Park, all of which
he had frequented as both a teenager and college man in the Bay
Area, he vividly re-created in McTeague. Nor was this technique limited to McTeague: he drew upon his own experiences as a Harvard student for early passages in Vandover, while for The Pit he relied heavily
on recollections of his boyhood in Chicago, recollections a later visit
there while researching the book revivified. Meanwhile, London
tapped similar resources of his own, as the countless autobiographical
details in The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, and The Valley of the Moon,
among other works, attest. Indeed, Charles Walcutt stated that London turned so often to his own life for subjects for his fiction that “increasingly [he] became a man yearning for the past” (15). A couple of
decades later, with The Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck duplicated this
practice, inaugurating his love affair with California’s beautiful Salinas Valley and its individualized settlements and subsequently spreading out geographically to base subsequent novels such as Of Mice and
Men, Cannery Row, and East of Eden on memories of his ties to other
locales, all in a constant quest to “revisit” his own past (Parini 2).
In addition to illustrating authorial memory at work, novels by Norris, London, and Steinbeck explore deeper mysterious aspects of memory; indeed, memory functions as a component that ironically adds
spiritual dimensions to their naturalism. Instinct, for instance, a form
of memory often suppressed, lures McTeague back to Califor-nia’s mining country near Colfax because he never actually forgot his childhood
spent there. After killing Trina and stealing her five thousand dollars
in gold pieces, he boards the Overland train from San Francisco,
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 21
thence a stage from Iowa Hill, finally moving by foot into home country. Norris comments that “not once did instinct deceive him” (279) in
his return, “straight as a homing pigeon,” to his past (281). A scant
two weeks later, however, McTeague’s “sixth sense” takes over, and he
quickly follows “animal cunning,” an atavistic streak even more primal
than instinct had been (285); as the novel winds to its ineluctable conclusion, Norris refers to McTeague’s “sixth sense” continually. Of
course, his instinct to survive at any cost, the atavistic compulsion to
wander into the blistering, arid sands of Death Valley, does not save
him in the end, as Marcus, compelled by a vengeful desire so strong
that he too acts instinctively in stalking McTeague into the desert,
eventually accosts him. Yet, in a curious twist, Marcus, not McTeague,
is killed in their frantic tussle, prompting the reader to query if Norris’s point may be that McTeague, though now evidently doomed
miles from aid, might have avoided both Marcus and death had he
followed his “sixth sense” more quickly and systematically, for he had
lost precious time exploring the Panamint Range for gold with his
partner Cribbens, time which Marcus meanwhile employed both
wisely and well in pursuing his elusive quarry. Norris clearly implies,
ironically, that instinct might have saved McTeague, helping him to rebuild his life. His untimely rejection of the “sixth sense,” which had
previously served him well, consigns him to the same class as Sieppe—
but with one important difference: as a dentist in San Francisco
McTeague had learned to use the strength and other talents he had
gained as a car-boy in successful ways, something Sieppe never mastered; thus, when a second opportunity to put instinct into practice
confronted him, he should have taken it, thereby gaining a spiritual
second lease on life.
London descends to the animal world to explore the mysteries of
memory and instinct. Buck, the magnificent half-St. Bernard, halfScotch shepherd dog, follows instinct advantageously in The Call of
the Wild. Removed from a soft, undemanding life at Judge Miller’s
and thrust into a “kill or be killed world” in the Northland (396),
Buck quickly recalls his primordial past, “the memories of his heredity that gave things he had never seen before a seeming familiarity;
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Literature and Belief
the instincts (which were but the memories of his ancestors become
habits) which had lapsed in later days, and still later, in him, quickened and became alive again” (379). Easily adapting himself to this
wild and fierce environment, Buck soon assumes the coveted pride of
place among whatever group of dogs fate places him. Like McTeague,
he makes his new circumstances work for him; unlike McTeague, he
consistently capitalizes on his instincts. When his final master, John
Thornton, extends unanticipated love to Buck, he responds in kind,
but when Thornton’s death erases “the last tie” to man and the superficialities associated with Thornton (415), Buck answers the “irresistible impulses seiz[ing] him” (407), leaping to “the many-noted call,
sounding more luringly and compellingly than ever before” (415), once
more establishing himself as chief among his fellows, wolves now as
opposed to other dogs. Where primordial memory’s knock finds
McTeague wanting, Buck through such memory recovers an immemorial proclivity buried deeply in himself which restores him to a latent
spiritual past.
For Steinbeck individual instinctive memory does not play as
prominent a role as does the collective recollection of a particular
group. In The Grapes of Wrath, when the Joads hesitantly enjoy the relative comfort of the government camp at Weed-patch, the realization
that their inability to gain employment could well force them to leave
it prompts both Ma and Pa to recall their former home in Oklahoma
in two distinct ways. Where Pa remembers ducks flying south, doves
lighting on fences, blackbirds sitting on wires, Ma recalls “the choppin’
block back home with a feather caught on it, all crisscrossed with cuts,
an’ black with chicken blood” (441). Thus, Pa’s memories focus on
their home’s surroundings, while Ma’s emphasize home itself. Apprehending that her happiest memories revolve around family—feeding
them, nurturing them—Ma also understands that these same memories can in time reshape themselves not only to accommodate additions to and reductions from her family but also to welcome to the
family’s quite literal bosom total strangers such as the starving man
Rose of Sharon breast-feeds at the novel’s end. In bearing a child, Rose
of Sharon has entered with Ma an eternal communion of women
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 23
which, while it does not exclude men wholly, complicitly functions
outside the male realm, depending, rather, on the collective wisdom of
all women. Faced with the old, weak man in the barn where the Joads
shelter, “the two women look . . . deep into each other. The girl’s
breath c[omes] short and gasping,” as she responds affirmatively to
her mother’s unexpressed request (618). For both women, this event
marks an enigmatic moment of spiritual renewal born of months of
adversity suffered during their long journey from the Dust Bowl.
A similar instance of shared memory, this time between husband
and wife, occurs near the end of Norris’s The Pit, when Curtis Jadwin,
after forgetting his wife Laura’s prescheduled birthday at home and losing his attempted corner on wheat, returns to Laura, who has just endured the worst day of her life. Somehow knowing that his memory of
his loss will very possibly seal the madness on the brink of which he
has teetered all day, Jadwin retreats, whispering to his wife, “Honey, it’s
dark, it’s dark. Something happened. . . . I don’t remember,” to which
Laura, aware that her near consent to her would-be lover Corthell’s implied offer to elope must never be acknowledged, answers in an almost
identical vein of shamed withdrawal, “It’s dark. . . . It’s dark, dark.
Something happened. Yes. I must not remember” (411). Silently admitting their joint errors, they determine to leave Chicago and the bad
memories it contains in favor of building a new life in the unknown
West, founded not on the selfishness and insincerity of their immediate past but on the love they recall from their earliest married days. As
Jadwin tells Laura, “We started right when we were first married . . .
and we’re starting all over again” (417); in doing so, they will erect their
new faith on the concurrently recollected foundation of their old.
London exhibits a variation on collective memory in The Valley of the
Moon. Contemporary British writer Robert Barnard observes that “we
say we remember things, but after a time just the saying it has created a
static picture in our minds that stands for the real memory” (23–24), a
comment that summarizes what constantly recurs to Saxon. Her
mother’s vivid retelling of both her own pioneer experiences and
Saxon’s father’s war stories retelling imprints both so firmly on Saxon’s
mind that she identifies herself inextricably with her mother. So close is
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this empathy that Saxon often relates her mother’s tales in plural firstperson—thus to Mrs. Mortimer she reports, “‘We fought off the
Indians”’ at Little Meadow (345)—thereby manifesting her tacit conviction that both she and her mother underwent these experiences, conveniently forgetting that she had not yet been born. This conviction,
fanciful though it is, further persuades her that she, like her mother, can
successfully negotiate any obstacle. Animated by the spirit of her parents
and endless generations of Anglo-Saxon parents before them, Saxon instinctively overcomes such obstacles—sudden miscarriage, spousal abuse,
near starvation, and emotional depression—emerging stronger and more
spiritually secure because of it.
Closely related to collective memory is selective remembrance, a
condition which characters in novels by all three writers also display.
After McTeague and Trina marry, Trina effects such a sweeping moral
reform of his routine that he relishes his changed habits, easily exchanging his former routine for the seemingly more sophisticated delights which accompany life with Trina. Unfortunately, such
preferential and instinctive recollection soon breeds resentment when
the disclosure of McTeague as an unlicensed dentist drastically reduces
their income; however, for the first three years of their marriage
McTeague had been happier than ever before, primarily because he
had unconsciously supplanted old memories with new ones. White
Fang in London’s novel of the same name shows the positive effects
of selective memory on the bestial level. Unlike Buck, White Fang
conscientiously represses his wild instincts in becoming domesticated,
eventually forgetting even his mother as he serves successive masters.
Instead, his brain registers “a succession of memory pictures” (151), to
which he adds more frames as his allegiance to man solidifies. When
Weedon Scott permanently ships White Fang back to the Southland
in California, he honors his new training so completely that he earns
the sobriquet “Blessed Wolf ” from Weedon’s mother and sister (325).
Never again will primeval call lure him away, for he has found true
happiness, lying “with half-shut, patient eyes, drowsing in the sun,”
his consciousness awash with memories not of his old life but of his
current one (327). Adam Trask, protagonist of East of Eden, also tastes
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 25
the sweet fruit of selective memory. Of all men, Adam merits the right
to be angry at the hand life has dealt him. Deceived by his wife,
Cathy, who slept with his brother Charles on their wedding night, left
with unwanted twins to raise when Cathy deserts him, and saddled
with a half-built mansion he will never complete, Adam could fairly
have shaken his fist at fate. Yet he eventually awakens to life’s beauty
through the patient ministrations of Lee, a loyal employee, and Sam
Hamilton, a good-natured friend. When news of the death of his wife,
by
then
a rich madam in the seamy line of brothels in Salinas, reaches him,
that appreciation for life comes full circle, as he sheds tears for her despite her many betrayals. Assuredly, had he felt so inclined, Adam
could have dredged smug bitterness from his recollection of Cathy’s
despicable behavior, but he chooses not to dwell on her sins, finding
solace and spiritual fulfillment in his memory of the woman he once
and still loved.
Thus far, this examination of various novels by Norris, London,
and Steinbeck has demonstrated that while memory spiritually animates selected characters, it customarily does so in a limited fashion,
either during a single period or phase of a particular character’s life. In
Martin Eden, however, London breaks this mold by presenting memory
as a narrative continuum which dictates the course of a character’s entire existence, allowing him to reinvent his own persona in a quest for
spiritual renewal grounded in remembrances, both old and new. Assiduously essaying to fit Ruth Morse into the culturally diverse cavalcade
of women with whom he has previously been intimate, Martin soon
comprehends that his earlier experiences with the opposite sex had in
no way prepared him for the likes of her, for “[n]ever had he seen such
a woman” (5): after meeting Ruth and her mother, he consciously and
“swiftly dismisse[s] the kaleidoscope of memory” of his past encounters (13). Based merely on the appearance of a type of woman foreign
to him, Martin willingly “receive[s] the flood of impressions that [i]s
pouring in upon him and being mentally annotated and classified”
(15); that is, he is ripe for personal reinventions, a task he assigns himself even before quitting the Morse household after his initial visit:
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Literature and Belief
“He couldn’t fake being their kind. . . . Whatever happened, he must
be real. He couldn’t talk their talk just yet, though in time he would.
Upon that he was resolved” (19). Under the sway of this alien influence, his “sensation usurp[s] reason, and he . . . quivers . . . with emotions he had never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility
where feeling itself [is] exalted and spiritualized” (27), altogether an apt
image to describe the unaccustomed mood of an experienced sailor
such as Martin. Meeting Ruth thus establishes a new pattern for Martin, one which he will continue to observe through much of the novel.
Indeed, upon leaving Ruth’s house, Martin is “in an ecstasy, dreaming
dreams” of the future as he “reconstructs . . . the scenes just past” (25):
past, present, and future have merged for him into a seamless tissue of
memory. In time, purified by the twin cauldrons of intensive self-education and incessant composition, Martin necessarily moves beyond
Ruth in taste, learning, and ability, but he never ceases to envision his
life as an ongoing memory of his original self, constantly teaching him
how to reorder his existence. His decision to commit suicide, therefore, becomes an eminently logical one, since a review of his life—first
infatuated with Ruth, then striving to learn to write, and finally attaining success—reminds him that the “Mart Eden” of his memory, the
“sailor” he once was content to be, is the “real” man, while the writer
he has become is the “sham” (386). This supreme moment of spiritual
self-discovery ironically prepares him for death as the only possible end
of a life dedicated to reinventing itself repeatedly as new sensations
metamorphose into old memories.
A final manifestation of memory as the engine of survival and spiritual renewal in Norris, London, and Steinbeck is two-pronged, involving both false or falsely projected reminiscence and the some- times
fatal absence of memory altogether. Maria Macapa in McTeague provides a signal example of both conditions, for not only do her unlikely
memories of a wealthier past beguile her into creating an illusory ancestry, but her inability to recapture that memory after undergoing childbirth also proves her ultimate undoing by her deranged husband,
himself a victim of the allure of hollow memory. In like manner, Vandover illustrates the dual effects of false and absent memory. Unlike
Crisler: “California Naturalists” / 27
Maria, Vandover remembers almost none of his past, not even troubling to “collect” the few “scattered memory pictures” he retains (5).
Predictably, near the end of his life, when lycanthropy, a malady he contracts as a result of his own debauchery and lassitude, has reduced him
to a pitiful creature, “every day he [finds] it harder and harder to remember things” (296). Where Vandover and Maria cannot recover their lost
memories, a third Norris character triumphantly can. The story of
Vanamee, the ascetic shepherd in The Octopus, fittingly exemplifies memory made flesh through repeated exercise of the powers of mental persuasion. Vanamee convinces himself that Angéle, the living child of his
dead fiancée, also named Angéle, whom Vanamee loved so passionately
that her death almost destroyed and certainly has consumed him, has replaced her mother as the channel for his desire and his love, resulting in
a kind of sublime spiritual serenity which suggests that even specious
memory, correctly applied, can result in satisfaction for characters in naturalistic novels.
Both London and Steinbeck also construct characters who benefit
from the effects of either absent or false memory. When his pug-nacious support of the teamsters’ strike in Oakland lands Billy Roberts
in jail in The Valley of the Moon and leaves his wife Saxon financially
destitute, where once Saxon’s memory of her mother’s heroic exploits
would have sustained her in such dire circumstances, now she endures the interminable month of Billy’s incarceration by substituting
“lapses of memory” for memory itself in order to retain her sanity
(246). Fortunately, Saxon’s mental legerdemain works, as once again
memory or, rather, its absence, grants her spiritual peace. In Of Mice
and Men false memory sustains spiritual survival. Lennie’s “rabbits,”
regardless of how real he imagines them to be, remain spurious, the
created memory of an overactive imagination. Even so, his illusions
probably afford Lennie as much comfort as he can hope to enjoy,
gaining him George’s protection in the process: at his death Lennie is
as contented as he has ever been in his life, fantasizing for one final
time on his private “place” where with George he “live[s] on the fatta
the lan’” (116).
In his lyrically elegant autobiography Speak Memory (1951),
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Literature and Belief
Vladimir Nabokov declares that “[o]ne is always at home in one’s
past” (85). If so, then not only are the characters created by the “California Naturalists” comfortably “at home” in their memories, but so,
too, are their creators. Alike in many ways, these three writers are perhaps most similar in that each, though in his own way a Naturalist, offers his characters a means for spiritual revival through successful
reliance on or manipulation of memories, a revival which gradually extends beyond the characters to readers of their books who, surprised
perhaps to find it in novels traditionally classified as naturalistic, esteem them the more when they realize that all three writers have succeeded in transcending a category clearly too confining for them. That
they also parallel each other in many other aspects of their lives and
work only enhances their joint use of memory for narrative and thematic (even spiritual) purposes.
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